Liguori: Hawks at a Distance

As Pete Dunne points out in his witty and eloquent Foreword to Jerry Liguori’s latest guide, identification books have been trying for a century to make the birder’s ability to see a bird coincide with her ability to identify it: to make, in Dunne’s words, “Far” match up exactly with “Close Enough.” Of necessity, it’s been the raptor watchers who have put the most effort into closing that gap, abandoning traditional plumage-based characters to concentrate instead on shape and flight habit to identify birds dismissed by most of us as indistinguishable specks.

Those birders schooled in the old “field marks” method of bird identification will find Liguori’s Hawks at a Distance startling—and ultimately, I think, revelatory. The book treats nineteen widespread migratory species (along with another nine geographically restricted or resident birds). Each is illustrated with a handsome, eminently field-guide-worthy portrait, but the real meat here is in the series of small, often badly lit images, six to a page, that are intended to show the reader what can and, most importantly, cannot be seen on flying raptors viewed at a distance and from angles ranging from awkward to impossible These photos aren’t specks, thankfully, but they are intentionally and carefully chosen to force the reader to concentrate on those elements of shape and attitude that become painfully visible just as a speck begins to assume two-dimensionality. Hawks at a Distance is, I am sure, the first identification guide ever to pride itself on presenting images of birds of unknown (and unknowable) species, age, or sex.

Pictures don’t speak for themselves, of course, and Liguori provides detailed captions pointing out the features each image is intended to illustrate. Throughout, the author is at obvious and laudable pains to avoid anything reeking of jargon, and a short glossary introduces most of the indispensable terms of art. I was puzzled to find the familiar and perfectly serviceable term “wing window” replaced by “panel,” a neologism that will inevitably lead to confusion with the very different panel shown by the wings of some passerines, for example. I would also have liked to see such behavioral terms as “lofty” and “wristy” defined—I think I know what Liguori means, but only because I know the birds, not the words. 

In addition to the photos and their captions, each species is also given a brief prose introduction, broken into an overview of its salient structural characters and a description of its distinguishable plumages. The latter seems unnecessary: no reader of this book is going to be without the standard raptor references, all of which treat plumages in greater detail than Hawks at a Distance can or should. And the sections titled “Overview,” while full of valuable little nuggets, are plagued by logical and syntactic clunkinesses and would have been well served by some editing.

The most innovative and perhaps the most interesting section of the book is titled simply “Shapes,” in which each of the nineteen principal species is depicted in up to 50 (!) thumbnail-size silhouettes; these pages have an obvious forebear in the annotated genus plates of the author’s 2005 Hawks at Every Angle, but the kettle-like swirls here are even more useful. Let your eye drift through until you find a silhouette you would not have recognized in the field—then see what Liguori has to say about it. You’ll be surprised at what you learn, and at what you can see when at first you might think you can’t see anything.